TDK Japan, a supplier of read-write heads for hard-drive manufacturers predicts that 2.5 hard drives will be a reality by late 2009, and will reach markets by early 2010. The company presented a roadmap to the press late last week, that shows that it will have the technology available to produce 3.5 inch disk platters with 640 GB data density. Four such platters will go into making 2.5 TB drives. On the 2.5 inch drive front, the roadmap shows a jump to 320 GB per platter density, which allows 640GB 2-platter SFF drives to be announced by manufacturers towards the end of this year.

Hard Drive manufacturers had reached the 2 TB milestone earlier this year. Seagate and Western Digital used four 500 GB platters in their products. At this rate of data density increases, a 5 TB hard drive in 2010, as predicted by Hitachi's Yoshihiro Shiroishi last year, sounds a little more realistic.Source: Register Hardware

by: human_errorAwesome - as long as the only drives at that capacity aren't the slow-as WD green series. Gimme a samsung spinpoint/seagate/WD black 2.5TB drive and i'll be a very happy man.

These drives are mostly for storage, average performance is just fine for that.

by: Musselsits no surprise, they just need to slap another platter in really.

That's one solution. Though TDK increased density here. I do wonder why they don't make higher drives with more platters, or 5,25" ones, like the Bigfoots (which were quite unreliable :)) back in the days. I believe the market is there.

Prediction? I think we will see "performance" HDDs die out. They cant compete with SDD. And at slower speeds, HDDs can store at higher density at lower power.

Next step? 4500rpm 5TB HDD 3.5" format. With slower read/write speeds. Whereas SSD will get faster, and the standard size will become 320MB rather than 80/160 as it is now.

10TB? While in theory you could manuf. a double height drive like the old SCSI drives... due to manuf. and reliability costs (they were horribly unreliable and prone to damage from small knocks)... more likely peeps will just RAID array them.

by: lemonadesoda10TB? While in theory you could manuf. a double height drive like the old SCSI drives... due to manuf. and reliability costs (they were horribly unreliable and prone to damage from small knocks)... more likely peeps will just RAID array them.

...and much like Intel sticking two Pentium 4's into one chip to keep up with AMD, we'll probably see double-height mechanical drives. They'll have to. :laugh:

isn't there a limit to the density of the process they currently use on HDD? i can't recall what limit i read but it wasn't too high in the T, like 5 or seomthing. could be wrong. i also read that they may take a route of using multi faced disc's as well as multi heads for faster read times and double the memory space per platter. could be wrong and i doubt we'll see this since SDD is going to take hold.

yep, something with how small the magnetic particles get or something and room temperature will mess it up due to the size. course previous estimated limits have already been broken so i'm sure something will be thought up to continue HDD size, course as i said i'm betting SDD becomes mainstream before that happens